The young man in my 10th year English class slinks down in his seat at the back of the room and looks out at me from under the lid of his NY Yankees baseball cap. The Yankees? Seriously? Does he not remember that I am from Baltimore?
“Are you a Yankees fan?” I ask him, and he nods and utters, “Yes, I am,” almost defiantly.
“Well, then you and I may have to fight,” I joke, pulling out my Baltimore Orioles calendar featuring players with their pets and various shelter animals from BARCS, but he only shrugs.
The Yankees Fan is one of four boys in my 10th year class at the Scheiber Sandor School in Budapest who are determined to convince me that they are too cool to be impressed, even by an English teacher who has traveled all the way from America to help them express their ideas in writing. But I have been teaching longer than these boys have been alive so even The Yankees Fan cannot put a dent in my enthusiasm and resolve.
“Today I am going to talk to you about falling in love.” As I announce this, my class sits up a bit straighter, and I notice I have captured the attention of The Cool Boys. Gabor, my Hungarian co-teacher looks nervous, having cautioned me that his students may not be mature enough for this lesson plan. But I plough ahead, knowing that the lesson could go down in flames, yet determined to encourage my Budapest partner teachers to take creative risks in their classrooms.
I read a quote by Georgia Heard, writer, poet and founding member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project: “I’m in love with light and everything the sun brushes. I look around for what else I can fall in love with. The tulips, orchids and roses in water buckets, and the man who tends them – changing water and dripping buds. Inside the market walls are stacked with vegetables –unhusked corn, ripe tomatoes, the green and red next to each other make my eyes dance.” I watch the students as I read, all looking at me, transfixed by the rhythm of the phrases, mesmerized by the colors that the words paint across their mind’s eye, wondering what it means to “make my eyes dance.”
Falling in love, I explain, is not merely a romantic idea, but an intensity of feeling, an excitement that someone or something inspires in you, a yearning that you do not want to quench. They look at me – The Cool Boys, The Yankees Fan, the rest of the students who sense that they are standing on the precipice of learning something important. I know I need to bring this concept back around to an example that they can understand, so I tell them the story of when I adopted a kitten for the first time, and how in her tiny trusting innocence, she made me fall in love. Worried that they will now label me The Crazy American Cat Lady, I look around and notice heads nodding in understanding. The Cool Boys won’t quite look at me, but they have begun to write in their journals. I have made an inroad, something on which my class can hang our collective hats, even a Yankees baseball cap.
